Many groups had great power and influence around the world during the holocaust. How this influence was used or not used helped shape experiences, often horrific for many European Jews. In Hungary, toward the end of the holocaust not only did the international institutions become silent bystanders, but their very own neighbors turned their back on their fellow citizens knowing what atrocities awaited their arrival to Auschwitz.
The brutality started close to home when fellow Hungarians, in a combined effort with the city government, railroad officials, and law-enforcement agencies coordinated a swift transport of 400,000 Jews to their almost certain death. “In March 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and in April, they forced the Jews into ghettos. Between May and July, they deported most of Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz-Birkenau.” German SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann was named chief of the team of deportation experts. “One of the salient points about the deportation of the Jews of Hungary is the extent of the involvement of the local authorities. Eichmann was impressed by the eagerness and zeal of the local auxiliaries.”
This massive and rapid deportation led to problems for the Germans. Soon after the deportation began it was determined that Auschwitz was not prepared to kill as many people as they had planned. The train tracks were extended into the Birkenau camp so that the Jews could be brought closer to the gas chambers. An agreement was reached with the railroad officials to alter the train schedule to suit their needs. On “alternate days two trains of deportees, then three trains, should be dispatched.”
Eichmann was directly responsible for the scheduling of evacuations from Budapest. This was detailed in the Veesenmayer ...
... middle of paper ...
...ated to do so because it would have eliminated their future chances to help, if given the chance. Also, there was concern that any intervention would comprise the Red Crosses ability to provide help of millions of military captives. Despite the Red Crosses complete lack of support for the holocaust victims; they were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1944.
In conclusion, from local governments to large influential organizations, people around the world turned their back on the Jews during the Holocaust. Almost every day in our lives we have the opportunity to be more than a bystander. We should put aside our own individual fears in order to pursue fairness for others around us. Being a Boy Scouts has taught me to do for others “…to help other people at all times.” When I consider our oath, it reinforces how selfless we all must be to make the world a better place to live.
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” (Elie Wiesel) The Holocaust is a topic that is still not forgotten and is used by many people, as a motivation, to try not to repeat history. Many lessons can be taught from learning about the Holocaust, but to Eve Bunting and Fred Gross there is one lesson that could have changed the result of this horrible event. The Terrible Things, by Eve Bunting, and The Child of the Holocaust, by Fred Gross, both portray the same moral meaning in their presentations but use different evidence and word choice to create an overall
" The journey to the camps began with a train ride, with Jews packed into pitch-black rail cars, with no room to sit down, no bathrooms, no hope." (Lombardi). This is a quote from a book a man wrote about his time in Auschwitz when he was young. Up to 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, an awful event led by Adolf Hitler and his army based in Germany, the Nazis. One of the horrible things about the Holocaust was the boxcars taking the victims to the camps. Some things that made the boxcars in the Holocaust so bad are; the size of the boxcars, the conditions in the cars, and the deaths that occurred on the journey to the concentration camps.
At the start of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror, no one would have been able to foresee what eventually led to the genocide of approximately six million Jews. However, steps can be traced to see how the Holocaust occurred. One of those steps would be the implementation of the ghetto system in Poland. This system allowed for Jews to be placed in overcrowded areas while Nazi officials figured out what to do with them permanently. The ghettos started out as a temporary solution that eventually became a dehumanizing method that allowed mass relocation into overcrowded areas where starvation and privation thrived. Also, Nazi officials allowed for corrupt Jewish governments that created an atmosphere of mistrust within its walls. Together, this allowed
In the Holocaust, the Nazis persecuted and murdered over 6 million Jews during a four and a half year period. By the 1930s the Nazis rose in power and all the Jews became victims. One of the ways the Nazis persecuted the Jews, was putting them into tight confined places called ghettos were they suffered for many years.
From 1942-1944 Eichmann and his aides organize the deportation of Jews from the so-called Greater German Reich, Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Croatia, Greece, Italy, and Hungary to killing centers in German-occupied Poland, primarily Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Should you risk everything you have to help others? Everyone agrees that many Jews were killed during WWII, but some say that people should not have helped them, while others believed that they should have.
Jewish people weren’t the only ones sent to concentration camps. People such as people with disabilities, Homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, and Socialists (Byers.p.12). Everyone that was sent to concentration camps was sent via train cars (www.historychannel.com). They had no food, water, or restrooms for up to 18 days. Many people died from the lack of food and water (Byers, p.15).
The holocaust was a catastrophic event that killed millions of innocent people and showed the world how inhuman mankind can be. This dark period in world history demonstrated unmatched violence and cruelty towards the Jewish race that led toward genocide. Genocide did not begin with the Holocaust; nor was it a spontaneous event. Many warning signs within world events helped provide Germany and Adolf Hitler the foundation to carry out increasing levels of human depravity (Mission Statement). These warning signs during the Holocaust include; Anti-Semitism, Hitler Youth, Racial profiling, the Ghettos, Lodz, Crystal Night, Pogroms, and Deportation. However, their exposure comes too late for the world to help prevent the horrors of the Holocaust. For example, Anti-Semitism was never put into reality until the holocaust overcame the attitudes of its’ German Citizens. It also provided the driving force behind the education of the Hitler youth. Hitler’s persuasive characteristics consumed the people into believing all of his beliefs. This is how racial profiling came about; Hitler made it so that the Germans had the mindset that Jews were horrible, filthy, people that did not deserve to live like the Germans or have the same luxuries. As a result, they moved all the Jews into one secluded area away from the German citizens; an area called the Ghettos. One of these Ghettos was the town of Lodz, who kept meticulous historical records of everything that went on in the city. However, it was not a safe for Jews; never feeling at ease not knowing the uncertainties or dangers lying ahead. For instance, in Crystal Night, they did not know that it would be the last night for some of them to be with their families. In general, Jews were just living...
During times of war, mankind's humanity is unknowingly corrupted. Humans are capable of causing suffering by doing nothing - by not interfering with the bad things that happen, self-proclaimed ‘good people’ allow others to undergo misery. Elie Wiesel speaks about the world’s lack of intervention during the Holocaust in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, angry, “that the world did know and remained silent” (Document B), and goes on to explain how, “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” (Document B). Wiesel is anguished that so many people stood by and watched as others were systematically murdered by their own government. Citizens that were not persecuted were so terrified
...s of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which made the horrifying actions of the Nazis known all over. The Ally forces pressured Germany to create a homeland for those who suffered through the Holocaust. Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims tried to regain their property and wealth that was taking away during the Holocaust. In 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of apologizing for the crimes which were committed by the German people.
Many historical events took place in the 20th century that will be remembered forever, but the one occurrence that everyone knows of and will forever be remembered was World War Two. World War Two, the greatest tragedy that has ever happened on the face of the earth, the genocide of Jewish people, a complete nightmare. When people think of WW2, many of the time the image of “those poor Jewish people” comes to mind. Many ask themselves how this could have happened. It just doesn’t make sense to them. Did people around the world at the time of WW2 have these kinds of deliberations? If they did have this kind of reflection then how did six million people perish? During the time leading up to the outbreak of World War II, the Western Press consistently carried numerous reports of the German's anti-Jewish policies and their purposeful victimization of the Jews living in Nazi Germany as well as the annexed territories. The general public cannot claim that they did not know what was going on, that they were uninformed. Whether or not they chose to believe it however, is a completely different story. The public were indeed outraged in many of the cases but the governments of the major European democracies felt that it was not for them to intervene for they felt that the Jewish problem classified as an internal affair within a sovereign state. The attempt to discover what exactly the people around the world did to save the Jewish race is not going to be an easy task but it is going to be a worthwhile one which should uncover a lot of unknown facts to many people.
The Auschwitz camp was incredibly big and horrific that it was known as a “death factory.” The death rate of this camp ranged from three to four million people. Closely by the camps, one witnessed the horrors, the guard towers, the barracks, the barbwire fences, gas chambers, furnaces, and even...
The Jews were packed tightly and stuck in train cars for days or even a week depending on where they were going. These people had no clue where they were going, no clue how much longer it would take, and no clue what would happen once they stepped off of the train. In the book Night it explains how Elie was transported in a cattle car with about a hundred more people shoved into it. Some people in these cattle cars could not survive the long journeys and died. The prisoners in the cars went to the bathroom on the floors which just worsened the conditions. Halfway through the journey, the train would stop and any dead prisoners would be thrown out of the cattle cars. Anybody who was still alive went on to their destination. In an internet source is talks about how cruel and horrible the conditions were inside of these transport cars.
The Holocaust, the mass killing of the Jewish people in Europe, is the largest genocide in history to this date. Over the course of the Holocaust nearly six million Jewish people were killed by the Nazi Party and Germany led by Adolf Hitler. There are multiple contributing factors to the Holocaust that made it so large in scope. Historians argue which of these factors were most significant. The most significant contributing factor is the source of the Holocaust, the reason it occurred. This source is Adolf Hitler and his hatred for Jewish people. In comparison to the choices of the Allies to not accept Jewish refugees and to not take direct military action to end the Holocaust, the most significant contributing factor of the Holocaust is that Adolf Hitler was able to easily rise to power with the support of the German people and rule Germany.
The Jewish Holocaust has to be one of the most famous and tragic genocides reported. We are taught that the reason we learn all about it is so tragic historical events like this won’t repeat in the future, but they do and they are. What many people don’t realize is that bystanders play a huge role in the events of the holocaust. Yes, the Germans played an obviously enormous part, and it wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for them, but there were many other situations where others could have helped stop the tragedy and the deaths of millions of people.